Ten... Portable USB 3.0 HDDs

SuperSpeed pocket drives tested

Common Topics

Samsung M2 Portable 3.0

I’m not going to even bother beating around the bush with the M2, this is the best USB 3.0 portable hard drive currently on the market. It’s the fastest, best value and near-as-dammit the smallest, with only the WD My Passport Essential SE beating it by around 1mm in width - like it matters? More to the point though, is the three-year warranty that comes with this drive.

Crystal DiskMark showed this HDD reading at an impressive 112MB/s and writing at 106MB/s. I am also very fond of Samsung's no-gimmicks approach – there’s no bloatware or additional licenced software to fill the drive or rack up the price. Currently, only the 1TB model is available, but expect more capacities soon.

Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Ultra Portable

The GoFlex certainly isn’t the slimmest drive here, but it does offer the highest capacity. Buy one of these and you can hold 1.5TB in the palm of your hand. Seagate also throws in Memeo backup for Windows and the ever-useful Paragon NTFS for Mac users.

The 1.5TB model was dispatched for testing and I was pleased to see that performance hadn’t been compromised for capacity. Crystal DiskMark reported 90MB/s reads and writes in the 1GB sequential test.

Oddly though, some of the retailer options from Seagate's site have the 750GB drive appearing to be more expensive than the 1TB version, so it's worth shopping around.